


Brumal Harvest

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Case Fic, F/M, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 22:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17109359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Mulder and Scully are trapped deep in the wintry Ozarks while something stalks them from the shadows…





	Brumal Harvest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoseThornhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseThornhill/gifts).



She remembered the first time they were trapped in a cold place. He’d told her to bring her mittens, and she’d first been afraid to die while they bumped and rumbled through turbulence in that death-trap of a plane that rattled them toward Icy Cape. They’d been so new to each other, like undissected specimens, full of strange promise. In that first brush with real danger, with death alone in the dark and cold, she’d felt the fierce initial surge of protectiveness. At first a curiosity, he had grown so soon into a fragile extension of herself. Pared down by the barren landscape and throttling wind, by the threat of madness and violence, they were shucked to the threads of their earliest connection—the first tentative shoots of this thing that had since grown so strong and solid between them. It was more than partnership. More than friendship. More than love, even.

And now here they were again, fallen off the cliff of civilization at the frozen periphery of life. Waiting to die, perhaps. She’d grown accustomed to death’s pacing at her doorstep, but never had it felt so literal.

The scritching sound came again.

“Mulder,” she whispered.

He touched his finger to her lips in the dark, and she sought out the glint of his eye for reassurance. Sparse moonlight reflected off the snow through the small, square windows. It was a cabin, she supposed, to someone. A hut, really. A single round room, its walls sealed with plaster and painted white. The rough-hewn wood floors were draped with animal skins as carpet. They had no chopped wood for the small stove, and outside the wind screamed. They huddled under two reeking wool blankets on an ancient and battered loveseat, clinging to each other for warmth and comfort.

Again the sound came, a slow dragging of something ( _claws_ , she thought) against the weathered door. Mulder’s hand tightened around her bicep and their breaths slowed in tandem.

“It’s still here,” he breathed, so low she couldn’t be sure he’d even said it.

Whatever it was had killed four in these woods already, had chased them down—no,  _hunted_  them—to this place. They were miles from their car. Miles more from any electricity that would charge their cell phones (and too deep in the woods for signal, anyway). They were prey and their hunter was waiting them out.

Mulder and Scully were still for so long under the blankets that, after a time, they fell asleep. When Scully opened her eyes again, the room was brightening with the dawn light, amplified by the fallen snow. The wind had slowed to a melancholy keening. There were no sounds at the door.

Pressed against him, limbs entwined, she was almost comfortable, despite the lack of heat in the small cabin—he was like her very own furnace, a heated blanket, along the length of her body. Under her cheek, his heart beat a steady rhythm of  _thump-thump_  that made her want to stay in this cradle of warmth until death came for them both. But she knew: today would be their last chance. She whispered his name and felt his fingers twitch against her back.

She raised her head and met his eyes. It was so intimate a gesture in their positions, so like a pair of lovers’ first waking gaze that she wanted to smile. But they were fully clothed—more than fully clothed in their coats—and the blankets still smelled musty. And there was danger outside this circle of warmth. And they were not lovers.

Despite these things, he reached up to touch her face. “You okay?” He asked.

She leaned in to the touch of his warm hand and regarded his stubbled face. His hooded eyes. She nodded. “I think it’s gone,” she said.

Mulder pushed himself to sit up, and the blankets fell from her shoulders. She shivered at the loss of both his body heat and the coverings. She had teetered at the edge of life once already this year, but he had brought her back. Her hand moved involuntarily to her neck where she felt the raised blemish of her scar. She had lost a child at Christmas. Now, after all of that, it was nearly her birthday and she may not live to see it.

She felt Mulder’s hands come around hers. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Scully looked at him. “You couldn’t have known.”

“What do you think we should do?”

There was a moment of heavy silence. “East,” she said. “East is all we have left.”

What she meant was  _East until the sun goes down. East until it catches us_. It was their third day in the cabin with no food, and they wouldn’t last much longer. East until the end.

—

Five days earlier, she’d been biting her lip and frowning at his insinuations about a monster in the Ozarks. “There’s a climate anomaly that occurs once every fifty years or so. Temperatures dip, snowfall increases… and there are always disappearances, six or seven on average.”

“Mulder, has it occurred to you that the bad weather itself is probably what causes the disappearances? People think they can make it where they’re going, get caught in a storm, wander away from their cars?”

He smiled—she’d taken the bait. “Ah, but does wandering away from your car leave tracks like these?” He pulled up a slide on the projector of an impossibly strange marking in the snow—an elongated footprint that appeared to have three similarly long toes.

“What the hell is that?” She asked.

“Good question. Nobody knows.” He pressed the button and another slide appeared, a splash of blood on the snow, flung long and narrow. “Doesn’t look like he froze to death.”

Scully frowned, intrigued now, but also a bit concerned. “Mountain lions?”

Mulder shook his head.

“Come on, Scully. Let’s do some good old fashioned monster hunting.”

And she had tried so hard not to smile.

—

“How many rounds do you have left?” His hands were numb, but he thought he could still fire his weapon. His nose burned with the cold. He could only imagine how Scully felt—she was still so thin, and they hadn’t eaten in days.

“Four, I think,” she said. “But Mulder…”

“I know.”

They’d fired nearly all their rounds at the thing over the past three days, to no effect at all. Mulder and Scully had been walking maybe five hours, which at least kept their torsos warm, if not their feet and hands. They’d been nearly snow-blind at first, walking east into the sun, but the light was behind them now, casting their shadows ahead of them. What that meant, though… they’d passed the mid-way point. There was no going back.

Scully stumbled a bit and leaned into him. He held her by the arm to steady her. There were rocks and logs they couldn’t see beneath the snow. Every step was dangerous, but they couldn’t stop now. The shadows lengthened. Night was coming.

“If we get out of this,” Mulder said, “I’m going to that diner, the one near the motel? I’m going to order every single thing on the menu.”

“Oh god,” Scully said. “Pancakes. Twelve of them. With strawberry syrup.”

Mulder groaned.

“And coffee. So much coffee.”

He wanted to cry at the thought. “Stop, you’re killing me.”

Scully laughed, and the sound almost made everything okay—the fact that he smelled terrible, that he hadn’t shaved in days, that he couldn’t feel his legs, that he’d gotten them, once again, into a situation like this. That his beautiful partner had survived cancer but probably still wouldn’t see her thirty-fourth birthday. If they made it out of this, he thought, he would give her the best birthday ever. He’d buy her a present that wasn’t cryptic nonsense. He’d get drunk with her on good wine and take her dancing if she wanted. He’d kiss her, if she wanted. He’d tell her he loved her.

“Scully…” he said, readying another apology, a confession, something. But before he could speak again, the sound of branches creaking, breaking, stopped him. Both of their heads whipped around.

“Mulder?” Her eyes, wide like saucers. Another branch broke, and they saw not the thing, but snow falling around it from the mangled trees.

“Run, Scully.”

And they did.

—

Here her memory faltered, broke into flashes of sound and image. There was crashing in the trees, the scream of wind, and her own cloud-puff of breath heaving into the cold air. Too early, she’d thought. There was still light. It came too early. Mulder’s fierce grip on her arm dragged her forward; snow crunched under her awkward, stumbling, exhausted feet.

“NO!” He’d screamed.

Fumbling for her gun with frost-bitten hands, she’d stumbled again and Mulder came down on top of her. The terrible sound of fabric ripping, of his strangled cry. And then, somehow, they’d been off the ground and moving again, feet cracking through fallen twigs and branches, pounding against and over snow-buried rocks, and then finally into a clearing. The sun was almost down but there was more light here—sky above instead of entangled treetops. The thing followed.

Gun in hand, she tried to fire but she was shaking with the cold and her gloves hindered her hand movement—no time to take them off. The shot went wild and missed her target, the blurred object of teeth and claw she could not make her eyes focus on. Instead, the gun moved low and the bullet hit the ground in front of the thing. Burrowed into its elongated shadow in the empty clearing.

The thing howled.

“Scully…”

“The shadow.” They looked at each other briefly.

“Aim for its shadow.”

She fired her remaining three rounds into the ground at its feet.

—

Three days later the air had warmed and the snow was melting, trickling streams across the motel parking lot that flowed from the mountainous piles made by the plow. Still, Scully felt cold, felt maybe that she’d never be warm again. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and knocked on Mulder’s door.

He was slow to answer and she caught a wince when he swung the door inward.

“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Come in.” He stepped back to let her in and she set some papers and her small black bag on his bed.

“They found our car,” she told him. “Fuel line cut, hood smashed. Skinner’s gonna love that one.” When she turned, he was watching her carefully, arms crossed over his chest.

“And the body? The… thing?”

She shook her head, braced for his disappointment. “Nothing.”

He nodded, as if it were what he expected.

“Can I check your back?”

“Scully. They just re-bandaged it this morning.”

“I know,” she said. “I want to check it.”

She tilted her chin toward the bed, and he sat. Gently, she helped him remove his sweater and shirt to reveal the long bandaged gash across his back. “Oh, Mulder.” She touched his skin around the edges of the bandage, peeled back the edge to check for swelling. He hissed when her fingers brushed the raw edge of the scrape. “Sorry.” She pressed the dressing back down without changing it. “It looks okay.”

He turned to face her, some unreadable expression in his eyes. “I told you it was fine.”

She lay a hand on his bare shoulder and nodded. The air in the room felt heavy, and she was hyper aware of the warmth of his skin under her fingers. He’d fallen on top of her, bruised her rib, to save her. “I wanted to say thank you,” she said.

He placed his hand over hers and turned more fully. “Scully, it was my fault we were out there. You saved us,” he said.

She chuffed out a laugh. “By accident.”

He tugged her down to sit facing him on the bed. He was watching her with that heavy-lidded look again, brow furrowed, as if some internal war was brewing behind his eyes. They’d collapsed in the clearing in a heap of blood and tears after she’d shot the thing that stalked them, sure that they would die anyway in the cold night. But a helicopter, searching for the missing agents, had spotted them as dark splotches against the unceasing white. In the hospital, they’d been fed, cleaned, rehydrated, and warmed. Tomorrow morning they could go home.

“I made myself a promise,” Mulder began quietly. “If we lived, I’d give you a good birthday.”

Scully felt her face warm. “It’s not for another week,” she said.

“I know. But I’m telling you now.” Both hands held onto hers in the small space between them on the bed.

“Mulder, you don’t owe me anything.”

His fingers squeezed. He raised her left hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles. “You’re wrong about that, Scully.” She felt light-headed. He hadn’t done that since she lay in a hospital bed dying. They were out of the woods, now—literally—and she didn’t know what to make of it. “I owe you everything,” he said.

She felt her eyes burn with tears, could feel her nose redden, and wanted to look away. He held her gaze, trying to tell her something with his eyes. She thought she understood. She hoped. He was making a promise to her. A vow: We’re together in this. There’s  _more_ to this. Our story is just beginning.

She breathed deeply and leaned forward, just as he did, so their foreheads touched.

“Next week,” he murmured, and she could feel his breath touching her lips. It sparked her pulse and her heartbeat thudded all the way into her fingertips. “I’m gonna take you out, okay?”

She nodded, and it made their noses bump. They both smiled. She reached a hand up to touch his cheek, wanting so badly to kiss him. Instead, she whispered, “How about those pancakes and coffee? That hospital food wasn’t very satisfying.”

He turned his head to kiss her palm, and it was almost, almost enough.

“Sounds good,” he said.

She helped him with his shirt, and they went for a late lunch of everything on the menu.


End file.
